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paternalistic than Taylor. A bit elite. A bit patronizing
perhaps. He had a great voice to listen to though,
pronouncing the h in
where
in a way that has all but
disappeared today.
Civilisation
was shown in colour
and it was a massive hit with the minority of viewers
who had colour tellies. People even held
Civilisation
TV parties and watched it diligently and with buffets.
This was television history making television history
and it spawned a whole new genre of multi-part,
part-authored documentaries which, being something
of a mouthful, were soon dubbed sledgehammers in
TV circles.
In the 1970s sledgehammers were all the rage.
1973 alone saw
The Ascent of Man
with Jacob
Bronowski,
The American Bicentennial
with
Alastair Cooke and
JK Galbraith on Economics
.
Attenborough himself resigned as Controller to make
Life on Earth
. And I think it was Attenborough’s
very mobile, enthusiastic full-of-wonder and
non-hierarchical style that more than anything that
paved the way for Michael Wood and later Simon
Schama to walk and talk us through the past.
Attenborough, a Cambridge natural sciences
graduate, took his academic learning and presented it
in an erudite, entertaining and emphatically mobile
guided tour on the television. And we loved it!
Sledgehammers
Kenneth McKenzie Clark was born in London in
1906 the son of a very wealthy Scottish family. His
great-great grandfather invented the cotton spool.
They are the Clarks in Coats & Clark threading and
the family were among the first of the post-industrial
age super-rich. Clark studied history of art at Oxford
and in 1933 became the youngest ever Director of the
National Gallery and author of scholarly art books.
He was certainly an interesting man, a great critic of
modern art and post-modernist thought and yet as
Chairman of the War Artists Advisory Board he
persuaded the government not to conscript artists
and found work for the sculptor Henry Moore and
as an advisor to the Ministry of Information he was
to commission Dylan Thomas to write scripts for
propaganda films. Clark was a founding member of
the Arts Council of Great Britain playing an
important role in the Festival of Britain in 1951 and
later becoming a Trustee of the British Museum.
When he was awarded his life peerage in 1969 he
took the title Lord Clark of Saltwood having bought
Saltwood Castle near Hythe in Kent where four
knights of Henry II had plotted the assassination of
Thomas a Beckett. Saltwood Castle had been the
childhood home of the MP and Telegraph editor
Lord Deedes a very tall cadaverous man who once
nearly swiped me clean from the saddle of my bike
outside the Royal Courts of Justice when he flung out
one of his great arms to hail a cab. Local legend has
it that Goering ordered the Luftwaffe not to bomb the
castle as it was said to have been earmarked by him
as his post-invasion home.
Lord Clark was invited to make the television
programmes by David Attenborough who was the
Controller of the fledgling BBC2 television station.
Unlike Taylor, Clark travelled the world to show
the viewer the treasures he was talking but like AJP
Taylor, Clark lectured to the viewer and even though
there was music and images his style was much more
Lord Clark’s son Alan of
diaries fame inherited
Saltwood Castle